


Tartarus

by noncorporealform



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Firenze | Florence, M/M, Mild Gore, architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-14
Updated: 2015-07-14
Packaged: 2018-04-09 07:39:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4339727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noncorporealform/pseuds/noncorporealform
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a reconstruction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tartarus

_Who are you telling this story to?_

Unsure, he constructs it. It’s made up from fragments, the very things of a first spark of understanding. They’re the tools his imagination keeps in stock to make a strange place, sometimes golden, sometimes blue, and in the rarest, brightest occasions a red like rubies that fills him in a wave. It’s a fallacy that he makes only the people run through his empathy machine, because its places too. He reconstructs a wall before it was the sky for a new constellation made of arterial spray, the unblemished architecture of a door that lasted for two generations before a boot crashed it inwards, splintering the noble protection that held for decades.

Will is not _there_ quite, not locked in a reconstruction but he can feel it building as he sits on a bench next to Hannibal Lecter. Another fragment comes together in Botticelli’s golden paint, the glow conjuring space, because environment does not exist without a healthy empty space for illumination. When it all comes together the world might be full of gold. He draws forward to it, leaving the sea-blue sorrow behind him. That won’t be the color of the reconstruction he builds. Not when he sits beside Hannibal Lecter and can’t feel sorrow, when he knows why he did not just get on a plane. The pilgrimage is better made in the contemplation, in the footfalls, in the holy shrines visited.

The next fragment finds him in a bullet piercing his shoulder and he falls onto stones older than the founding of his country. His mind grabs onto fragments of railroads and their clinking noise are in the air, not yet settling into the shape they’ll make.

Hannibal is holding his face up and Will is aware that the knife in his hand was gone, the one that would have freed him from this narrative thread, snapped like _that_ with a little expert use of a hand that is used to knowing when it was too dangerous not to cut the sail away.

 _So that’s gone_ , he thinks, knowing it doesn’t matter when Hannibal stabs him under the arm and he wonders exactly how much of it was surgical and how much of it was needing the body under the good doctor’s hands to be reminded of its fragile standing in his humor.

“Give that a moment.”

 _Fuck you, Doctor Lecter_ , and it never comes out of his mouth.

Clinking railroad tracks appear before him, and they have been laid out before him in the catacombs. No train will come through here, but the silver gleams in the cold dark. He reaches his hand out. The blood in his eyes causes them to close. He feels the snuffle of breath and the soft skin of an animal’s nose.

“You had to make me,” Will mutters.

Some part of him was aware that Hannibal had stopped whatever he was doing. Will was aware of being stripped of clothes and somewhere a heady medicine smell floated towards him.

“I tried to make you something beautiful,” Hannibal corrected. “Something that could have been my companion here. But you broke my heart.”

“So you’re going to destroy your creation?” Will asked. “Saturn devouring his young?”

His bitter laugh made Hannibal’s face solemn.

“What happened to Saturn when Chronus failed in his task?” Hannibal asked.

“He left one alive,” Will said. “Thrown into Tartarus.”

“You would throw me deeper than Hades.”

“We’re already there, Doctor.”

Hannibal saw the shift in his face and his eyes looked open as if he could see the new vision surrounding Will Graham. He knew what he saw when he tilted his head to peer into Hannibal’s face, the tips of antlers of the crown that sat neatly on his head as he clothed himself in a hide of feathers and fur.

“Do you see me now, Doctor Lecter?”

It would be golden. The cathedral that constructed itself overhead was grotesque. No architect would have ever built it, even if it were a vision that plagued every thought and dream. The struts were bones, the stained glass flesh and marrow, the pipe organs were made of railroad struts, the balconies terraced by antlers, and the statues were bodies too familiar in their tableau. It all sang with metal, clinking ivory, and harpsicord strings. What was more, there was no effort to make it, no reconstruction needed. The cathedral had always been there.

 _You had to make me into something that desired this_.

The man Will Graham had been would not have let Hannibal take him away. He would have fought with every instinct that flowed as gifts from survivalist ancestry. Will Graham as he was would have clawed at him, looked for a gun or a knife, used any tool he could to survive. That blood had been weak when he could only hold on to Hannibal in his kitchen and it had all bled away. This time he let himself be taken away.

The elegance of Hannibal’s bolt-holes were astounding in a way that had become predictable. It was some out of the way little ruin with no electricity or running water but it managed to have murals, a spectacular view, and even a stash of books.

That was where Will opened to him. Hannibal had also made him like this, the one thing Hannibal hadn’t intended from the start but which he welcomed with avid curiosity. Will hadn’t been able to imagine the doctor as someone with a sexuality that was anything but between mind-numbingly ordinary to disinterested. Will Graham’s knowledge of his appetites, as it had once before, broadened.

Will led with his tongue and Hannibal let him in though Will was sure he would be thought undeserving. What glimpses he could catch of Hannibal’s face spoke of the gladness at having given a gift that was truly loved by the intended.

They were both still bleeding from their wounds, grunted at the reminders of their bruises; it didn’t matter when the pain exploded anew when they were rough or that they bled and smeared the blood in with the sweat they became slick in. None of it mattered when the black brocade they lay on lapped it up.

Hannibal fucked deep into him, each movement cascading from his neck to his hip in serpentine rolls. Will underneath had legs splayed like bird’s wings and a grip like talons. Hannibal’s coiling hands pressed open dams of pleasure all the more exciting when he knew what just a few more pounds could do.

Hannibal had made him the man who wanted this, but out of the stone and metal of the trailing landscape, the fragments he’d been gathering in the wake of what they did together. Will Graham had not been destroyed and some other taking his place. He was always the man who could become this. Hannibal had been the only architect to see the structure and decide _that’s what should stand there_.

Hannibal kissed him and Will felt pulled into the sky, surrendering to the deep tremor where he was filled up, a body reacting to being fucked with tremors in the thighs, not so different from what happens in pain but with an entirely different rush of chemicals. Hannibal was fucking him harder with shorter strokes and he felt it working and building until he couldn’t stop the inevitable. He shouted against Hannibal’s mouth and an oblivion followed.

Hannibal held Will’s head and peered at his ecstatic face as Hannibal’s great work attempted to control his pants and whines. Will let him rotate his head and study his flushed lips, working throat, and shuttered eyes like he were a dismembered statue of marble.

“I need something else to keep with me,” Hannibal said.

The even tone of that voice told Will that Hannibal already came and he hadn’t seen it. It didn’t matter. Will didn’t have the same gift for memory.

Sometime in the night--when Florence was black and gold, the cuts and wounds easier to conceal--they slipped through the darkness. Will Graham began telling a story to himself, one that mended the fragments and gave his cathedral a name. In the darkness of the low catacombs where he best saw the great construction of gore, he asked the question.

_Who are you telling this story to?_


End file.
